9/29/08

That nifty piece of web searching technology we'e all come to know and love, Google.com, turned 10 just the other day! Hard to believe the huge engine which has dominated its competition and revolutionized the way we make money online has been around a decade!

There's a lot more to Google than just Adsense and the search component. Here's several more key components:

Adsense - The advertising payment program we all know and loveAdwords - the advertising program you pay for to drive traffic to your sitesAnalytics - a great free traffic and stat tracker for your blog or website.Blogger - the very host of this blog, a great free blogging platform which makes it easy for millions of bloggers around the world to capture their thoughts, images, videos and much more in blog form!Gmail - a nifty free email account for Google usersGoogle Product Search - a way to compare shopping prices on any item you want to buyGoogle Maps - a cool satellite view of any spot you want, a way to get directionsGoogle Labs - an internet tech playground where you can design websites, applications, study your site stats and more!Google Chrome - the recently released web browser that many are raving about! It's said to allow for private browsing and a feature which remembers your most visited sites to "get to know" your search habits better.

There's many more features to Google, and if you're reading this and haven't signed up for a free Google/Gmail account, The Monetizer strongly recommends it!

Google began way back in 1998 with less than 10 employees, a 7'x8' room and a $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim! It was the vision of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford U grad students, and at one point it was named "Backrub". The creative duo behind the search engine decided to change the name to "Google" - a play on the word "googol", a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. That represents Google's mission to organize an infinite amount of information on the web. Today Google has grown into a corporate giant worth billions, or millions, depending on how the stock market's doing any given day. 10 years and still growing, Google is definitely the biggest, baddest internet company around, and it has changed the face of searching and surfing for us all in many ways.

Google's B-day bash is not without "aging" concerns about the search giant as it continues to move forward. CNN.com recently discussed Google's stronghold on the search market and how this may hurt the company in its future expansion attempts.

Google's expanding control over the flow of Internet traffic and advertising already is raising monopoly concerns.

The intensifying regulatory and political scrutiny on Google's expansion could present more roadblocks in the future. Even now, there's a chance U.S. antitrust regulators will challenge Google's plans to sell ads for Yahoo Inc., a fading Internet star whose recent struggles have been magnified by Google's success.

Privacy watchdogs also have sharpened their attacks on Google's retention of potentially sensitive information about the 650 million people who use its search engine and other Internet services like YouTube, Maps and Gmail. If the harping eventually inspires rules that restrict Google's data collection, it could make its search engine less relevant and its ad network less profitable.

Despite the concerns, Google has great reason for celebration. Not many internet companies make it past 2 these years, so a decade is definitely something to cheer about!